Evolutionary Psychology - Evolutionary Human Social Sciences

4. Evolutionary Human Social Sciences

4.2. Evolutionary Psychology

Like “sociobiology”, the expression “evolutionary psychology” can be understood in several ways. Broadly speaking, it can refer to any ap-proach to psychology that is informed by evolutionary considerations, be they historical or functionalist. There are, broadly speaking, three types of approaches (that are not mutually exclusive): evolutionary histories of mind, evolutionary functionalist methodology within psy-chological research, and evolutionary psychology proper. Evolution-ary histories of mind try to trace the natural historical development of human mind and its capacities, although usually with the aim of forming non-historical psychological research as well. Examples in-clude relatively broad phenomena like the theory of mind and other social and communicative capacities (Byrne & Whiten 1988; Corballis

& Lea 1999; Brüne & Brüne-Cohrs 2005; Tomasello 2009 & 2014), mo-rality (Bekoff & Pierce 2009; Boehm 2012; de Waal et al 2014), religion (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Bering 2006; Schloss & Murray 2009), or lan-guage (Carruthers 2002; Mithen 2005), and these approaches usually combine evolutionary functional considerations with comparative

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empirical data from humans and other primates (or even larger clades), and are usually more interested in the temporal sequence of the emergence of new capacities (and the related phylogenetic issues) than functionality (see also Gangestad & Simpson 2007). Both this kind of evolutionary speculation and evolutionary functional analysis of psychological capacities and tendencies are sometimes used in the-orizing or as heuristics in psychological research that does not attempt to reveal evolution as such, but to learn about how the human mind works (for example, Baron-Cohen 1995; Narvaez et al 2012). These two types of evolutionary inquiries into mind (evolution of mind and evo-lutionary methods in psychology) are separated by their aims, but they are connected in much of the substance. The third type I men-tioned above, “evolutionary psychology proper”, includes ap-proaches that take the evolutionary perspective (historical or func-tional, or both) as the basis for understanding the workings of mind (and sometimes human phenomena beyond just mind), and they prac-tically combine the aims of the two other types directly (for example, Barkow at al 1992; Buss 2005 & 2014), usually in an (historically) ad-aptationist manner.

The classification of these approaches does not matter as such, and I do not evaluate any specific approach in this dissertation.⁸⁹ But

89 For the criticism of the boldest evolutionary approaches, see Buller 2005; Rich-ardson 2007; Ylikoski & Kokkonen 2009; and Smith 2020. Two aspects have to be distinguished in the problems commonly associated with the field of evolu-tionary psychology: the deeper problems having to do with theoretical and methodological assumptions and more superficial problems having to do with quality of research. Much of the epistemically bad reputation of the field may be related to the latter, and even in this case, the issue is not so much the quality of the research performed as it is the structural constraints under which it is done. First, evolutionary psychology shares the general problems of psycholog-ical research. The notorious replication crisis is probably symptomatic of several methodological problems (such as lack of actual replication of the experiments and a high level of theory-ladenness), but probably includes the overestimation of the uniformity of human psychology (see Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan

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it is worthwhile to note that “evolutionary psychology” is not one thing. Furthermore, the main idea for the study at hand is what evo-lutionary psychological approaches say about human sociality. Even here the focus is only on what difference the assumptions about indi-vidualism and holism make – and that these assumptions exist. To ar-ticulate this, I will briefly describe the methodological starting points of the evolutionary psychology movement that claimed the name of

“evolutionary psychology” first, and is also known as the Santa Bar-bara School, nativist evolutionary psychology, or “Evolutionary Psy-chology” (with capital letters) (see Laland & Brown 2002; Buller 2005;

Sterelny 2007), to highlight some clearly individualist tendencies. Af-ter this I will review some criticism and alAf-ternative takes that may provide reasons for the holistic perspective.

2010). Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, always suffers from a high de-gree of speculation and uncertainty. Evolutionary psychology accumulates the problems of these fields. Furthermore, whereas evolutionary approaches to an-imals can assume that the current habitat of the animal is approximately the same as the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, in the case of humans, this environment (including its social aspects) is speculative. To make things worse, the idea that the mind that evolved in this environment and that the minds of contemporary societies are the same, or highly similar, is an assump-tion that falls outside empirical evidence. All this makes evoluassump-tionary psychol-ogy highly speculative and vulnerable to assumptions that originate in precon-ceived ideas about “human nature” and the social interactions experienced by the researchers, as well as their value basis. This is all familiar criticism that has already been directed at sociobiology (Kitcher 1984; Segerstråle 2000). My point is, however, that even if the epistemically bad reputation of evolutionary psy-chology is deserved, this does not mean that evolutionary approaches to mind suffer from these problems necessarily, or that the deeper problems are actual problems. Furthermore, these theoretical and methodological assumptions may be correctable.

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4.2.1. Nativist Evolutionary Psychology

Nativist evolutionary psychology (or nativism) is a branch of evolutionary human science that was born partly out of the criticism of classical sociobiology and was critical towards it too. Its main founders were Donald Symons, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, in the late 1980s (Cosmides & Tooby 1987; Tooby and DeVore 1987; Symons 1989;

Tooby & Cosmides 1989), and other prominent pioneers include Je-rome Barkow, David Buss, Martin Daly, and Margo Wilson (for exam-ple, Barkow et al 1992; Buss 1995; Daly & Wilson 1999; see also Laland

& Brown 2002, 153–157). According to Cosmides and Tooby (1987, 278–279), the failure of (classical) sociobiology was to try and explain behaviour directly (as genetic adaptation to present conditions), when it should be obvious that what has been evolving is the psychological basis for the behaviour, and this has evolved in quite different environ-mental conditions to the environment of evolutionary adaptedeness, or EEA.⁹⁰ Instead, they propose an alternative research programme.⁹¹ The basic theses of the nativists are the following (Cosmides & Tooby

90 Both the term and idea come from the British psychiatrist John Bowdy (1969), who explained some features of child development as being functional in the environment in which humans evolved (Laland & Brown 2002: 161.) Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1987) adopted this notion and started to identify it roughly with the Pleistocene, during the last epoch in the history of our species in which the species was more or less one population and living in more or less similar conditions for long enough for evolutionary adaptation to have time to take place. The idea is contested: there are good reasons to think that the environment was not homogenous during this period (see Boyd

& Silk 2003; Levin & Foley 2004), and human evolution did not happen exclu-sively during that period – the evolution of human psychology is in continu-ation with pre-human psychology, and there have been evolutionary changes after that period, too, even if the EEA was the most relevant period.

91 This branch of evolutionary psychology can be argued to meet the criteria of a research programme in sensu Lakatos (1970) and should maybe evaluated as a research programme instead of as a series of empirical claims in its critical evaluation – but this is not important here.

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1997, 2000, 2005a; Tooby & Cosmides 1989, 1990a, 1990b, 1992; Daly &

Wilson 1999; Buss 1995 & 2014), my paraphrasing:

A) The mind has a structure that consists of functional sub-parts (modules) that perform specific tasks in cognition and motiva-tion.

B) External behaviour varies for several reasons, including be-cause of the different cultural surroundings people grow up in, but all the variation is dependent on the species-typical overall structure that is innate.⁹²

C) The tasks that the mind is designed to perform are domain-specific, and they have been selectively evolved to perform these tasks in these domains to fulfil specific needs. In other words, they are specific adaptations to specific environmental chal-lenges.

92 The criticism of evolutionary psychology, in this narrow and a broader sense alike, that points out to variation across cultures, is somewhat mis-guided. Explaining cultural variation and underlying psychological struc-tures are two separate projects that are not directly competitive (Mallon &

Stich 2000). However, the range of actual variation and the degree to which the psychology is species-typical are empirical questions that matter to how relevant evolutionary psychological explanations are and how much under-standing they can provide. The programmatic claim that evolutionary psy-chology reveals the universal human nature that should be the basis for all human science (for example, Tooby & Cosmides 1990b & 1992) is not very credible, for example (see Buller 2005; Richardson 2007; Ylikoski & Kokkonen 2009; and Smith 2020). If the universal features that evolutionary psychology reveals of human psychology were on the same level of abstraction as, say, the universality of language in the Chomskyan linguistics (in any of its forms;

see Chomsky 1980, 1986, 1993 & 2000), this would be an interesting fact to learn about this capacity, but it would not help us to understand human be-haviour any more than Chomskyan Universal Grammar would help us to un-derstand any particular natural language.

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D) The adaptation of the entire psychological architecture takes time. This is why the characteristics of mind that can be ac-counted for from the evolutionary perspective are rather spe-cies-typical than local, and also why the Environment of Evolu-tionary Adaptiveness (EEA) cannot be the current or a recent environment, but something that remained similar enough for a long enough time.

A few notes on these theses. The idea of modularity (A) and domain-specific adaptation (C) usually go hand in hand. A starting point for this is the standard approach of cognitive science that, following Da-vid Marr (1982), identifies three levels of analysis: the computational level (what task is accomplished), the representational level (how the system operates on the level of representational and motivational – that is, psychological – description), and the implementation level (how the brain operates). The evolutionary approach is a perspective on the computational level: what are the functions of mental capacities, cog-nitive mechanisms, emotions, and so on? Prima facie, this makes sense: if the operations of the brain and the resulting behaviour have evolutionary functions, they must be about what tasks are to be ac-complished. This also provides an answer to what kind of functional design the psychologists and cognitive scientists should be looking for (if adaptive evolution is what explains this design), and how to justify the presupposition (or explain the fact) that cognitive processes have such designs in the first place. There are, however, four well known problems in this approach: 1) How modular is the mind, if at all⁹³? 2)

93 The concept of modularity in psychology comes from Jerry Fodor (1983).

His list of criteria for modularity include domain specificity, automaticity, in-formational encapsulation, fastness of the processes, superficiality, specializa-tion, and universal individual development. This is not an exhaustive list, but a list of some typical characteristics that distinguish some cognitive processes from creative, rational “central processing”. Contemporary cognitive science distinguishes between two kinds of systems or domains of processes in a sim-ilar way without making references to modularity of the non-conscious

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What is the right grain size – both for the tasks in the selective envi-ronments and the mental functions, they being bound together⁹⁴? 3) The assumption of innateness and species-typicality of the mind’s structure.⁹⁵ 4) The problems of adaptationism, which has been dis-cussed already. Evolutionary psychology is explicitly making histori-cal adaptation explanations, but this is not necessary. An extended ar-tefact model version of evolutionary functionalism (including knowledge of actual evolutionary history) as discussed above, would probably be adequate to justify the research – although this interpre-tation also makes its claims to unificatory power (Tooby & Cosmides 1989 & 1992) much weaker. The first two problems, in turn, are em-pirical matters that affect how to do evolutionary psychology.

If the mind (or brain) did not possess evolved functional struc-tures at all, this would be crucial for the existence of evolutionary psy-chology. If the mind is massively modular with precise tasks, study-ing its structure, both empirically and through evolutionary theoriz-ing, would be much easier than if the structure is non-precise and the tasks are relatively general, and several behaviourally distinct traits

processes – I will return to this in the next chapter. In biology, there are other concepts of modularity, such as developmental modularity (Raff 1996), which may or may not be relevant to evolutionary psychology (see Wagner & Wag-ner 2003) but are not important to the discussion in this thesis.

94 Anderson 2007 presents an idea of massive micro-modularity as a more re-alistic view of how mind works: the processes of mind (whether modular or not) use a set of sub-processes that, in turn, use sub-processes, until the “bot-tom level” of modular processes is reached. Non-modular processes can be constituted by modular processes. If this were the case, it would make more sense to think that the mental units that get selected are the constituent parts, on the basis of the multitude of tasks in which they participate, not task-level modules. This would make the search for modules as solutions to evolution-ary challenges extremely complicated and difficult.

95 I will discuss innateness later. The assumption of species-typicality is a more general problem for psychology: much of the experimental work has been done with a specific population and many of the results seem not to be cross-culturally generalizable (Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan 2010).

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utilize the same structures.⁹⁶ So, for example, if there is a “cheater de-tection module” (Cosmides & Tooby 1992 & 2005b) that explains why the rule of material implication is automatically applied in the context of social norms but difficult to apply in some other contexts of infer-ence (Wason 1966), the evolutionary explanation may be quite straightforward. If the explanation of this discrepancy in thinking comes from a more general point about relevance (Sperber et al 1995), the evolutionary connection between the environmental challenges and the way mind works becomes vaguer and more complicated – this holds even if the social norms constituted the actual selective con-text for the ability to use material implication in thinking. However, this does not mean that evolutionary psychology must be built on the idea of modularity, specific tasks, and specific challenges – just that it would be an easier discipline to practice if this were the case. A char-itable interpretation of the nativist evolutionary psychology would be that it is the first step towards human evolutionary psychology⁹⁷ and just tries the easy way first. Bolhuis et al 2011, for example, calls for integration of criticism (about EEA, species-typicality, and massive modularity) into evolutionary psychological practices instead of con-sidering them as a theoretical challenge to the discipline as such. Fur-thermore, the modularity approach may work for some but not all characteristics of cognition and motivation (see Atran 2005). This is an empirical issue not to be taken stance on here. It should be noted, how-ever, that modularity is not necessarily connected to innateness:

96 For arguments for massive modularity, see Sperber 1994 & 2001; for criti-cism, see Karmiloff-Smith 1996; Buller & Hardcastle 2000; Buller 2005; and Samules 2005.

97 Evolutionary approaches can, naturally, be applied to animal cognition too.

Interestingly, Steven Mithen (1995 & 1996) has argued that even relatively close ancestors of humans must have had modular minds, but the last stages of human evolution have been about an increase in the fluidity and sociality of mind. Even if this is the case, it is very unlikely that this would have wiped out all of the modular structure: evolution builds on existing structures rather than replacing them, here as well.

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Annette Karmiloff-Smith (1996), for example, has argued that even modular structures of the adult mind are products of flexible individ-ual development, not innate (see also Buller & Hardcastle 2000).

However, the grain size problem (and the identification of the evolving trait in general) has consequences for the issue of individu-alism and holism. Theoretically at least, the trait may be individual or interactional from the evolutionary functional perspective in two ways. First, there is the issue of how to define the phenotypic trait that is responsible for the fitness consequences. That is, which set of capaci-ties and resulting behaviour constitute the unit for the functionalist analysis.

Second, there is the issue of what the mechanisms of inheritance for this trait are. This is connected to thesis (B) above: the assumption of species-typicality and innateness, which usually go hand in hand.⁹⁸ The psychological disposition that is selected and inherited is, of course, a characteristic of an individual. The function it has (that is, the focus of the evolutionary analysis and explanation) is the role that this behaviour plays in the individual’s life that affects the individ-ual’s fitness systematically. This may depend on the social surround-ings in two different ways. Social evolution is a dynamic process where the interactions between the individuals and the behavioural dispositions (or the frequency of different dispositions across the pop-ulation) depend on the makeup of the rest of the population and/or the group structure. In an individualistic approach, the rest of the pop-ulation functions as a selective environment for the individual psy-chological traits. In an alternative interpretation, some behavioural ex-plananda are interactions. The interactive phenotypes are functionally

98 The target of evolutionary psychology is something that is thought to be species-typical (and therefore an object of species-wide evolutionary explana-tion), and the basis for species-typicality is the fixedness – that is, innateness – of the trait across the species. The contrast here is with individual or cultural traits that are acquired (not innate) and (therefore) not an object of species-wide explanations. However, the link between innateness and species-typi-cality does not need to be this strong. Furthermore, both concepts in this equa-tion are vague and problematic. I will return to this later.

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explainable as being more advantageous for the individuals who are participating in them, in contrast to the other alternative interactions, and this is not reducible to individual-level traits alone – this means that in the cases of this kind a holistic approach is needed.

4.2.2. Individualism and Holism in Evolutionary Psychology Evolutionary psychology tends to be methodologically individualist in identifying the objects of research. Furthermore, evolutionary psy-chology tends to concentrate on traits that are innate rather than ac-quired. Even the nativist evolutionary psychologists do not dispute the role of culture and individual learning in psychology, but they claim that the proper target of evolutionary explanation is the psycho-logical structure that is species-typical and innate and does neverthe-less manifest even in behaviour affected by cultural and other ac-quired tendencies. The meaning (as well as the very meaningfulness) of “innateness” in these contexts is disputed. I will later articulate a concept of innateness that should both escape the standard criticism and capture the function the concept has in psychology. Under this interpretation, nativism would be about the identification of what is being explained, not a thesis about mind. If there is a psychological

In document Evolving in Groups : Individualism and Holism in Evolutionary Explanation of Human Social Behaviour (sivua 175-187)